The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others ’ interaction with the workspace. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual workspace, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with physical workspaces, partly because support for workspace awareness has not generally been a priority in groupware design. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and then show several widgets that can be embedded in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware systems to support the maintenance of workspace awareness.

Groupware toolkits let developers build applications for synchronous and distributed computer-based conferencing. This chapter describes four components that we believe toolkits must provide. A run-time architecture automatically manages the creation, interconnection, and communications of both centralized and distributed processes that comprise conference sessions. A set of groupware programming abstractions allows developers to control the behavior of distributed processes, to take action on state changes, and to share relevant data. Groupware widgets let interface features of value to conference participants be added easily to groupware applications. Session managers let people create and manage their meetings and are built by developers to accommodate the group’s working style. We illustrate the many ways these components can be designed by drawing on our own experiences with GroupKit, and by reviewing approaches taken by other toolkit developers.

Awareness widgets facilitate coordination for both synchronous and asynchronous groupware systems. Unfortunately, they cannot be used for multi-synchronous groupware systems. With a group of architects, we have designed a new awareness widget for multisynchronous groupware system called “State Treemap”. We have developed and integrated this widget in a platform for hosting virtual teams of architects. In this paper, we describe the motivations, the design and the realization of this original widget

Introduction Although the phrase team cognition suggests something that happens inside people's heads, teams are very much situated in the real world, and there are a number of things that have to happen out in that world for teams to be able to think and work together. This is not just spoken communication. Depending on the circumstances, effective team cognition includes things like using environmental cues to establish a common ground of understanding, seeing who is around and what they are doing, monitoring the state of artefacts in a shared work setting, noticing other people's gestures and what they are referring to, and so on (Clark, 1996; Hutchins, 1996). In this chapter, we will argue that awareness of other group members is a critical building block in the construct of team cognition, and consequently that computational support for awareness in groupware systems is crucial for supporting team cognition in distributed groups. Our main message is that: ... for people to sust

Viewports into large visual workspaces are sometimes supplemented by a separate window that displays a miniaturized overview of the entire workspace. Instead of this separate window, we have layered a transparent version of the overview atop the viewport. Because the overview fills the display, it becomes the largest size possible. An exploratory study indicates that people can use this unusual system, where they switch between layers when performing a construction task. Keywords: Transparent interfaces, overviews, groupware. INTRODUCTION Many computer applications provide users with a viewport into a large visual workspace through which they view and manipulate full-sized workspace artifacts. Miniaturized overviews (aka radar views) of the entire workspace are sometimes provided as well [2]. These overviews provide users with global context, which includes the spatial relations between objects, how changes affect objects outside the viewport, and a view rectangle that situates thei...

Abstract. Single Display Groupware (SDG) supports face-to-face collaborators working over a single shared display, where all people have their own input device Although SDG is simple in concept, there are surprisingly many problems in how interactions within SDG are managed One problem is the potential for interference, where one person can raise an interface component (such as a menu or dialog box) in a way that hinders what another person is doing i.e, by obscuring another person's working area that happens to be underneath the raised component. We propose transparent interface components as one possible solution to interference, while one person can raise and interact with the component, others can see through it and can continue to work underneath it To test this concept, we first implemented a simple SDG game using both opaque and transparent SDG menus. Through a controlled experiment, we then analysed how interference affects peoples ' performance across an opaque and transparent menu condition- a solo condition (where a person played alone) acts as our control. Our results show that the transparent menu did lessen the effect of interference, and that SDG players overwhelmingly preferred it to opaque menus.

. Due to the proliferation of computer networks the electronic support of geographically distributed groups has become increasingly important. With respect to groups we can distinguish between teams and communities. In general, team members know each other and collaborate to achieve a common goal while community members have just common interests or preferences. Often there is no personal contact between community members. The electronic support for both group types has developed independently. While communityware concentrated mostly on the building process, i.e. #nding people with similar interests, groupware focused on the collaboration process, i.e. the synchronization and exchange of information in the context of a speci#c team task. The paper proposes awareness as a common base for both communityware to improve contact building as well as for groupware to maintain group work at a high performance level. We discuss communities and teams in educational settings and pro...

This paper investigates design issues which support awareness in collaborative environments. The work we present is part of the POLITeam project, an ongoing research effort aimed at the development of electronic tools to support the cooperation of German government sites distributed between Bonn and Berlin. The paper addresses social, ethical, legal, and technical issues which form important prerequisites for the design of awareness functionality in large organizations. These aspects have been identified as the result of a tight interaction process among the systems developers and selected pilot users in a federal ministry. Based on these requirements, we present the architectural model of the awareness service of the POLITeam system. 1.

. Research in distributed problem solving in the last years focused on distributed applications which cooperate to accomplish a task. Another level of distributed problem solving is that of human teams which are distributed in space and cooperate in solving a problem. In this paper we will introduce distributed problem solving from the `human level', brie#y present the accompanying research area of ComputerSupported Cooperative Work #CSCW# and the di#erent basic mechanisms of computer support for workgroup computing, and then focus on the awareness information that is of special importance for supporting coordinated cooperation of groups with unstructured tasks. 1 Introduction The emergence of high-speed local area computer networks at the beginning of the 1970s resulted in distributed systems becoming an important topic in computer science. As a sub-discipline of distributed systems, distributed problem solving #DPS# emerged by combining the ideas of distributed systems and...

Abstract. Interface toolkits in ordinary application areas let average programmers rapidly develop software resembling other standard applications. In contrast, toolkits for novel and perhaps unfamiliar application areas enhance the creativity of these programmers. By removing low-level implementation burdens and supplying appropriate building blocks, toolkits give people a ‘language ’ to think about these new interfaces, which in turn allows them to concentrate on creative designs. This is important, for it means that programmers can rapidly generate and test new ideas, replicate and refine ideas presented by others, and create demonstrations for others to try. To illustrate this important link between toolkits and creativity, I describe example groupware toolkits we have built and how people have leveraged them to create innovative interfaces. 1